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Intel Unveils Full Details of Kaby Lake 7th Gen Core Series Processors (hothardware.com)
Reader MojoKid writes: Intel is readying a new family of processors, based on its next-gen Kaby Lake microarchitecture, that will be the foundation of the company's upcoming 7th Generation Core processors. Although Kaby Lake marks a departure from Intel's "tick-tock" release cadence, there have been some tweaks made to its 14nm manufacturing process (called 14nm+) that have resulted in significant gains in performance, based on clock speed boosts and other optimizations. In addition, Intel has incorporated a new multimedia engine into Kaby Lake that adds hardware acceleration for 4K HEVC 10-bit transcoding and VP9 decoding. Skylake could handle 1080p HEVC transcoding, but it didn't accelerate 4K HEVC 10-bit transcoding or VP9 decode and had to assist with CPU resources. The new multimedia engine gives Kaby Lake the ability to handle up to eight 4Kp30 streams and it can decode HEVC 4Kp60 real-time content at up to 120Mbps. The engine can also now offload 4Kp30 real-time encoding in a dedicated fixed-function engine. Finally, Intel has made some improvements to their Speed Shift technology, which now takes the processor out of low power states to maximum frequency in 15 milliseconds. Clock speed boosts across Core i and Core m 7th gen series processors of 400-500 MHz, in combination with Speed Shift optimizations, result in what Intel claims are 12-9 percent performance gains in the same power envelope as its previous generation Skylake series, and even more power efficient video processing performance.
It's an interesting time in CISC processors. With fabs having to spend exponential amounts of money for incremental gains in performance and power savings, a smaller company like AMD may be able to make a chip that's 90% as fast, at a much lower price, which I hope it does because it's good for customers on both sides.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
It's like telling me the Sun will be brighter tomorrow. Nothing is so outstanding in improvements anymore in chips. It's just more claims and numbers that most people don't even care about. Who cares about Intel graphics? If your a gamer your not using Intel for graphics and probably never will. My SkyLake was a incredible disappointment and I could have saved a hundred or more dollars buying a Hazwell and got almost as good performance. Its really not the chip anymore because OS's have improved to accommodate tablets and slower CPU's. Windows 10, Linux versions, OS X have all improved resource consumption and power use. It's really not a issue anymore, and Intel can improve slightly those numbers. But any dramatic claims are not happening.
I'm sure the graphics and video playback specs are important, but I'd like to know what changes they've made architecturally in the processor core. Maybe I missed it, but this article seems light on those details.